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Guess What? Linux May Not Be for Everyone
I feel like I may have covered bits of this here and there, but I couldn’t find it after a cursory check through my blog. Fanaticism is fanaticism, whether it’s religious or technological it follows the same path. Witness anyone who has just become an evangelical Christian (and it probably extends to other religions) as…
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Review: Cory Doctorow’s Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom
Today I just finished Cory Doctorow’s Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom. It’s the first epub book I’ve ever read and the first ebook I’ve read that I hadn’t previously read as a physical book. I’d been wanting to read the book for a long time, but the idea of sitting at my desk…
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Holy Video Game, Batman!
Sometimes jokes can be very misleading to outsiders. For a few months after hearing jokes about how gamey it was that Joker’s henchmen lost track of Batman as soon as he went up onto a gargoyle I didn’t have any inclination to play the game. It just seemed like it would be too jarring to…
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Stephenson Post CyberPunk
I read somewhere, maybe even Wikipedia, that the reason Bud dies so early in the The Diamond Age is that his character represents a stereotypical cyber-punk character and Stephenson is signaling that cyber-punk is over – this work of fiction is going beyond that. Stephenson then does a 90 degree turn genre-wise and does a…
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I Think I’ve Found My Second Passion
My first passion is photography. It’s something I’ve done all my life. (I think anything done continuously from about the age of five or six is all my life) I love coming up with an idea to shoot. Composing the frame is an artform. I love the emotional effect photography can produce in others. There’s…
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Podcasts I’m Listening To
I’ve been listening to podcasts for about two years now. I got into it because I love listening to some NPR programs, but they are always on when I’m at work or asleep on the weekends. Eventually, I heard on NPR that they have podcasts of various shows. I checked it out right away because…
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NYC Tet Trip Day 2
Part of my NYC Tet Travelogue. See part one here. this entry was originally written on ?13 Feb 2010 I went to the Lomography store yesterday and it was a very interesting experience. The store matches the aesthetic of the Lomography movement. It has a very casual feel to it. It definitely belongs in Greenwich…
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To ‘shop or Not to ‘shop
If you read anywhere on the web, you’ll see people talking about how Photoshop (and digital photo manipulation) is ruining the purity of photography. People argue endlessly about this as if they could get everyone on their side. Guess what? This controversy is older than radio. Recently I’ve been reading the great photography history, How…
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Yet Another Strange Bit of Web Behavior
This photo has suddenly become my daily most viewed photo for the past 10 days or so. Yesterday it had 32 views. It had 30 a couple of days before that. As of 2100 on 21 Oct, it has 22 views. [Almost] All of the views have been coming from Google and Yahoo image searches. …
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New Revenue Models
While listening to The Command Line Podcast a few weeks ago, they started talking about how digital distribution allows for innovations in publishing. I don’t remember what they mentioned exactly, but the prior link should take you to the show notes. The talk started a series of synapses firing in my grey matter culminating in…
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First Look Review: Braid
That a game like Braid can exist is a statement on where video games are as an art form with a well-established history and canon. To make a parallel in the paint world: without a long canon of traditional paintings of tables with fruit and bread, people wouldn’t have really understood the “parody” or “remix”…
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My History with Browsers Part 1: A History Lesson of Sorts
At first I used Internet Explorer because we had a free trial of MSN. Then we switched to MCI, who used Netscape (although you could also use IE) and I mostly used Netscape. I think this was around Netscape 4 or 5. I really liked Netscape A LOT and used it almost to the exclusivity…
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My computer Experience
Responding to Penguin Pete’s WHY is the transition from Windows to Linux easy for some people?, I had no idea my response would be so lengthy. So I decided to copy it over to my blog. Read his and the other comments and here’s mine. As for me, my first computer was a Tandy T80…
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Finally, some rulings that make sense!
Joystick.com reports that judges are finally starting to make some rulings that make sense! We all know (if from nowhere else, than from this blog) that the DMCA is evil. It allows all kinds of restrictions to be placed on you, even though you were a good citizen and bought the content legally. For example,…
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Becoming multilingual
Today I started learning Python. I picked it because it’s not only one of the hottest languages right now (outside of C#/Mono), but because GRAMPS is written in Python. I haven’t explored this deeply, but I know for a fact that plugins can be written in Python, if the entire program itself is not Python.…